up vote 3 down vote favorite
2
share [g+] share [fb]

On a linux server (Ubuntu Lucid), my used swap keeps growing by the hour on a server, and I'm having a hard time identifying which process is growing in swap.

What tool can I use to monitor this?

link|improve this question
56% accept rate
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

The usual way I do this is to let the system run until the swap utilization is evidently higher than it "should" be. Once you can see the problem run top, sort by Virtual Memory Size (sometimes just called Size, or VIRT on Linux -- The guy with the largest difference between VM Size and Resident size (RES) is usually your culprit.

The best way to know for sure is to make sure it's safe and then kill the process - If your swap suddenly frees up you found your leak.

link|improve this answer
Looking at the diff between resident memory and VM size is a good hint. Thanks. – Raphink May 17 '11 at 15:18
It's about 90% reliable -- I've found very few programs that allocate gobs of RAM and intentionally let it go stale enough that it gets swapped out :) – voretaq7♦ May 17 '11 at 15:19
1  
As a note, < and > can be used to select the column to sort by. – Raphink May 18 '11 at 7:59
Didn't know about < and > (Apparently doesn't work on FreeBSD 8's top though - you have to use o to set the sort order there) – voretaq7♦ May 18 '11 at 15:15
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

Have you tried running top and pressing M to sort all processes by memory usage?

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.